


Licht und Hexen

by Classpectanon



Category: Homestuck, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Horror, Illustrations, Multimedia, Music, Pain, pain and suffering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2019-11-12 11:17:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18009929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Classpectanon/pseuds/Classpectanon
Summary: Rose took the grief seed between her fingers and pressed it to her gem, feeling vitality cascading through her, using up some of her own magic to bring her foot back, patch the hole in her stomach, but the shallow cuts could remain. Her uniform dissolved away into a t-shirt and winter jacket and long skirt, while a white haired, dog-like creature padded next to her, paw over paw."You're doing excellently thus far, Rose Lalonde.""Can it, vile hellhound." Rose replied, turning around and leaving the church behind, crushing the used-up grief seed.





	1. Gabriel

**Author's Note:**

> When you see a ♫, click it! It will give you the author-recommended musical track for that section of story, to play along with the fake anime in your head.

[♫](https://youtu.be/Jgn1NEq2DiA)

"Becquerel, you damnable hellbeast!" Rose scattered to the wind, her voice penetrated by an arcing tendril of bright white light searing past her hips. She could only make footfall in Gabriel's barrier for split seconds at a time before feathers and bullets found her location, streaking towards her like meteoroids, accelerating into white-hot lances. Already, a hole was burnt through her stomach, about the size of a pin, and all of her limbs had been marked with shallow cuts like a dangerous lover. 

Gabriel's barrier was shaped like a church, fractalline and crystal and stained glass, pews replaced by obsidian black-and-white pillars that stuck through the "ceilings" and "floors" at odd angles. The serpentine witch clung to the central pillar like a lizard to a stick, a body made of gleaming beams of sunlight, wings of paint-on-glass moving at two frames a second that looked wrong no matter which angle Rose approached them from. Everything in this realm was either deadly sharp or indistinct, with smudged Trumpeters firing their rat-a-tat-tats Rose-ward whenever she landed, gravity forcing itself to wherever her feet were. Every projectile was slower than molasses, until it wasn't, and keeping track of them would be a lethal ordeal for anyone besides Rose.

She was too late. There was no evidence of the girl that Gabriel had taken in anywhere, and the thought hardened her. She landed on another pillar and kicked off of it - as soon as her feet left the ground, gravity became nonexistent. It only was real when she touched. Her wands crackled with light, and Gabriel let out a shriek, the kind of sound that glass being ground in a woodchipper made, the kind of noise the dust released when it landed as a fine powder on the ground. She didn't have time to fire, only to dodge, the Trumpeters blazing their slow-moving sounds.

She drifted to the edge of the barrier, left foot removed by a rifle round suddenly emerging at incomprehensible velocities from Gabriel's open, nonexistent maw. Blood freely floated, collecting into bubbles like a planet collecting from protostar accretion disks. She landed, and feathers emerged to grip her, maybe to tear off her other foot, but she kicked off into a spiraling, twirling launch. Not this time, Gabriel. A swish of her wand sliced the next person-sized rifle round in twain, letting it crash through the church's outside, tumbling to the infinite void alone.

"Don't you know, wretched thing? Your paltry parlor tricks will only work once!" Rose said, almost triumphantly, elbowing a pillar as she passes by to change her floatation in time to dodge an arcing ray of light that disintegrates two Trumpeters on its way to the edge of the barrier. She pinballs off another pillar. Gotta get closer. A third bullet is sliced with both wands at once, crashing into Gabriel's pillars, splitting them into floating chunks to provide Rose with another place to land off of, while the broken parts of the structures are quickly shuffled offstage, replaced with more smooth, flat land. Landing on the rotating, floating fragments almost makes Rose nauseous, but it blocks several dozen Trumpeter attacks, and she jumps off just in time to have her safe haven destroyed by Gabriel's light.

Now she's made it angry. Or sad. Or whatever emotion witches feel - it wasn't her problem. Her problem lay in revenge for the women killed by Gabriel, and getting his grief seed so that she could heal her leg and purge her soul gem. She bounced off and into the air, soaring past Gabriel, using the time to cauterize the stump of her ankle. It wasn't as if it didn't hurt - she was screaming inside, of course - but yelling wouldn't do anything about it, and she had to keep moving. She could focus on her missing foot later. Her clothing fluttered around her like wings as she jumped from pillar to pillar, occasionally stopping to deflect another rifle round, or dodge the Trumpeters' onslaught.

Returning to her starting point, now she was ready. Kneeling down on one leg, she let the feathers begin to wash over her, crossing her wands together to make an X, and then slashing them apart. Gabriel's barrier shuddered, and in an instant, the pillars began collapsing towards Gabriel, strung together with bright white ropes of light. Her woven spiderweb pulled itself together like a lasso, causing the fragile pillars to begin collapsing into shards and fragments. Gabriel let out a loud, wailing, grinding, hissing sound, before being crushed by his own barrier. The feathers reached up to Rose's chin, gently touching it, before freezing and beginning to crumble.

Pulling one of her wands backward like a fishing rod, Gabriel's grief seed traveled along one of her threads until she could grab it. The barrier fell away like glass falling off of a broken window, slowly chipping and cracking until the old abandoned church revealed itself, the charred corpse of Gabriel's latest victim pressed against the lectern like a preacher. Rose took the grief seed between her fingers and pressed it to her gem, feeling vitality cascading through her, using up some of her own magic to bring her foot back, patch the hole in her stomach, but the shallow cuts could remain. Her uniform dissolved away into a t-shirt and winter jacket and long skirt, while a white-haired, dog-like creature stalked aside her, paw-over-paw.

"You're doing excellently thus far, Rose Lalonde."

"Can it, vile hellhound." Rose replied, turning around and leaving the church behind, crushing the used-up grief seed. She might've been able to use this one a little more, but restoring a foot took a lot out of it, and Gabriel wasn't very strong. It fell apart into ash and she blew it into the wind, her final lamentation for the fallen witch and his victims.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel  
> The Witch of Hope. His nature is obsession. When prayer, thoughtfulness, solitude, and desire failed to enrapture his savior, he turned to force, blinded by his own light in his search for a goddess that will never come. In his self-centered world, the gates to the confessional are closed except to those with lustrous hair. He awaits his goddess with open wings and disdains pitiful humans.
> 
> Trumpeter  
> Servants of the witch of hope. Their duty is to announce the arrival of the goddess and stir Gabriel from his torpor.


	2. Norn pt 1

"I'm afraid I can't make it to your birthday celebration, John." Rose said, padding down the sidewalk, her shoes click-clacking on the cubic concrete. Astride her, a boy in a matching school uniform walked, unafraid of speaking his mind, but not until they reached the corner of the street. Behind them, on the rooftops, a small, lupine entity, eyes buried in stalks of white fur, stalked paw-over-paw, trailing closely to his single living servant - for a given definition of living, of course. "I-"

"Yeah, I know. You have internship stuff to do." John said, sighing. "That's all it's been for the past month." Rose cringed the second her footfalls brought her slightly behind John, before he turned around and gave her a look of equal parts pity and pain. It hurt her to the core, and already, she prepared for the tongue-lashing. "Are... we still friends? Or are you just trying to avoid me?"

"I'm not sure what you are trying to imply, Egbert." Rose responded, her pride both as a friend and as a magical girl immediately wounded. It felt as if the ink that made up her story was leaking out of her chest, and the only reason she didn't begin crying at the accusation was that Rose Lalonde never cried at anything. "I can assure you, that this internship is consuming-"

"Yeah, it's eating all your free time, and it's not even paid. And you never talk about it except as a reason to not go do something. You still haven't even told me what you're doing, or Dave, and you've been doing it for a month." John said, sitting against the nearest wall as he waited for the city bus to arrive, to cart the two schoolteens across the grid lines of their city like dots translating across a cartesian plane. "I mean... The details don't really matter to me!" He said, turning to her, a buck-toothed frown sticking out of his face, an expression he never seemed to wear until recently.

The city was quiet. Lonely. Empty and vacuous. The reason Rose asked for what she asked for was that she noticed that the city's rate of missing citizens was about 26% higher than its neighboring cities. Pundits blamed socioeconomic factors. Religious fundamentalists blamed the gays. Scientists discussed it as an interesting statistical anomaly, and then shrugged their shoulders. None of them could've guessed that the answer was monsters.

"I wish I knew why this city's missing persons rate is twenty-six percent higher per capita than the average American city." That's what her wish was.

"And now you will know." The hellhound said, not explaining the circumstance until it was too late.

Now she knew.

Hiding it from her family was easy, for obvious reasons. Or, at least, reasons obvious to her. Her two friends were a little harder. She didn't have the time to talk with them over Pesterchum, or deal with Dave's crippling fear of his parental unit, or John's teenage ennui, or having fun, or playing video games. She wished she could explain to them what was at stake here.

"It's charity work. Pest extermination." Rose said, almost blurted out, if blurting was a thing that Rose Lalonde considered herself capable of doing.

John shook his head. "I know I'm gullible, Rose, but you're lying to me."

Rose was a little offended. "And what makes you think that?"

John was a little offended - it seemed that was going to be a common theme this conversation. "You're doing pest extermination as charity work as an internship. I thought internships were for prospective jobs? And I definitely didn't take you for an exterminator."

The bus edged closer in the distance, slowly closing the gap. Rose was the first to break the ensuing silence, as the bus stopped at empty stops, offloading people, never taking in more. A papercutout crowd to shuffle offstage at the behest of some invisible puppeteer. "I see no reason why it can't be all three." Rose said, trying not to reveal her nervousness. She was better than sweating bullets, but she was digging her nails into her palms. The world, her world, would end if she dragged John into this invisible war of hers.

"It doesn't make any sense. You might've convinced me if you just picked two of them." John said, looking down at his feet, not noticing the white-furred hellbeast staring down at him. Rose saw, though. Rose saw a green tongue flick out of Becquerel's mouth, running across his black lips, like hers when she felt like putting on makeup for work. "I don't care what it is you're doing, Rose. I just don't want my best friend to lie to me."

Rose felt a mixture of ease and unease colliding like matter and antimatter inside of her. "I... can't tell you." She admitted. She'll give him that much, and hopefully he'll leave her alone regarding the issue.

"Are you being blackmailed, Rose?" John asked, looking up at her, his sadness morphing into anger and worry and concern while the dog behind him, above him, outside of his field of vision, almost laughed. Yes, she was, John, he was saying, silently. "I'll drop it if you really want me to, but I want to help you."

Rose avoided looking anywhere near the neighborhood of her feet. She was not so melodramatic as to perform the cliche act of navelgazing as an admission of guilt - she kept her gaze forward, steely, and cold. "You can't help me, John. I'm sorry."

"Are you sure? We... We can call the police. Or talk to the school councellor, or something, right?" John asked, his concern growing, his brow narrowing into a thin line of guilt and nausea. 

"It's not blackmail. It's just not something I can up and stop doing, though, either. I don't want you to get involved, John Egbert." Rose said, loudly and sternly and evenly, accentuating each word as if she was scolding a child, trying not to cry in the process. "You're far too kind for it."

"Okay. Sure." John replied, getting up from his cross-legged sitting position as the bus finally rolled up. "Whatever you say, Rose. Bus's here."

"I'll... Take the next one." She said back, as the doors opened to accept him.

"Sure thing."

 

\----- 

[♫](https://youtu.be/Jgn1NEq2DiA)

John jogged to keep up, never having known Rose to be an athlete and yet still barely able to match pace with her. Obviously, when he watched her turn around, talk to a white dog, and walk back towards school, he wasn't going to sit there and not find out what was going on. He had to help her, no matter how dangerous what she was going through was. Blackmail, or selling drugs, or even if she was selling herself, she was his best friend, and John couldn't take being powerless anymore.

Perhaps that might've been a mistake. He got off at the next bus stop as soon as he could, making his way across the alleyways that split up the apartment buildings and the small houses with tall walls and short gardens, trapped in a grid-like web that spread out over the city, subdividing squares into squares into squares. When he saw Rose in an intersection he was about to pass by, he immediately hid behind the nearest trashcan, watching a flash of light envelope her and leave her in a strange, elegant outfit. She said something John couldn't hear to the dog, and bounced into the distance, pushing off and leaping like an Olympian, further into the city's web.

It was twenty minutes after his chase that John had to admit he was lost. He saw Rose on occasion, considering the undersold flashiness of her outfit, the way she occasionally bounded through his vision in the distance, slowly getting further away each time he saw her, leading him to a steadily more abandoned part of the city. Houses that went unrented. Apartments that went unused. Warehouses left dilapitated, glass falling apart, the grid widening from narrow alleyways into wide, dark, unlit side-streets, swallowing the city's edges in indistinct river-delta crossings, until its bounded circle unwove itself into emptiness. It was only after another ten minutes until John realized not only was he completely lost, but he couldn't see the stars anymore, and not in the same way that the overcast sky told him.

"Are you lost?" A dog said, and he almost jumped out of his skin. Perhaps his noise was something like "Gyah!", or maybe a "Kyaaah!", as he flung himself against the nearest wall in shock, only now realizing that the dog was speaking inside of his head. A white dog. The same one Rose was talking to, if he had to guess.

"I think so." John said, succinctly. He grabbed the concrete wall, his fingers sinking into its woven texture, pulling it like he was kneading dough. "In fact, from what I saw today, I'd say I'm more than lost."

"Would you like me to explain the situation?" The dog asked, tilting his head as he stalked closer to John, paw-over-paw.

"Not really. I get the gist, it's like one of Daves' Bro's Japanese animes. And Rose is a superhero." John said, pulling his fingers free of the wall of the sidewalk, looking across the street at a drooping chain-link fence.

"Would the phrase "A Magical Girl" have any cultural context to you, John Egbert?" The dog asked, as John began walking.

"Not really, unless you mean like Sailor Moon or something.  _Fighting evil by moonlight_ ~" John replied, his feet sinking gently into the ground like he was walking on snow. Lamps stuck out of the ground at an odd angle, and in the distance, he heard a noise that could only reasonably be described as a shining light.

"We could call the situation comparable." The dog answered. John shrugged his shoulders and kept walking. In the distance, something rang out, a high pitched, bell-like chime. It almost sounded like an explosion, and John's walking got a little quicker, but when the ground beneath you was blocks of sidewalk concrete suspended on a sea of wool and yarn, it was more than a little difficult. Like playing "The Floor Is Lava" as a child, he hopped from square to square, every step forward bringing him closer past an inevitable event horizon he had unwittingly already crossed. The only way to go was forward.

John only seemed mildly perturbed when the sky closed up around him, and when he realized that he could reach out and poke the night sky's black and blue and purple yarn, and pluck out the little buttons that made up the stars, that something was far more wrong than initially noticed. The dog was there sometimes, usually not, but John felt that stopping for too long wasn't wise.

He saw spiders at the edge of his vision. Of course, he was scared, but he put on a brave face even as his heart hammered into his chest like a blacksmith beating a hammer down. He rounded a corner, opening the world up into a massive antechamber.

[♫](https://youtu.be/hmOaSOpe3LI)

Words failed him - the simulated night sky stretched out far above, white and grey lines of cloth slithering across as fake jetstreams, a skittering figure hidden under the cover of moonlight from the gigantic button in the sky. No, don't call out her name - you'll distract her. John knew enough to not bother the purple-clad girl as she jumped around in the loosely stitched simulacrum of a house's interior, bursting through the wall into a woven garden, and then the hidden figure followed behind her. Looking at it hurt, moving in a way that it wasn't supposed to, the sort of thing that made sense in a movie but not when your eyes saw it.

Three figures made of crumpled paper assembled into loose shapes, held together by thread, worked at repairing the damage Rose did. One of them spat yarn at a constant rate, the other one tied it to the torn, broken fabric, and the third one cut the knots into shape. When they turned to John, he froze in his place and attempted to turn around, to find his escape no longer existent, a false view of a city's horizon. He pressed his hand into it, and tried to pry it open, only to find more cloth behind it. His heart was beating so fast that he felt like it was about to integer overflow into stopping entirely, when a crumpled paper talon crept over his shoulder.

"JOHN!" He heard, and his fist flew doll-ward, trying to beat away the paper figure, but all that emerged were black beads in the hundreds, small and indistinguishable, turning into a crawling crowd. He let out a grunt and sent his second fist into the paper, only to have a familiar figure dash by, and the paper doll split into dozens of fragments. He shook the beads off of his hand, and then his arms, trying to go anywhere, stepping gingerly over the body of the shredded doll. Rose stood there for a second. "You're-" She tried to say, until John's face blanched. She tried to move, but it was hard to do with a pin through your shoulder.

The distance between them was far wider than John realized. A yarn river flowed to split them apart, steadily widening them. Beady eyes stared in his direction as a second pin drove itself through Rose's neck.

All he could say was "Look out!", and she raised a hand, only to have it pinned to the wall, punctured twice over.

His heart was stopping. His heart was stopping. It was going to burst.

He just wanted to help. He didn't mean to distract her.

Was she going to die with regrets?

John was. He was sure of it.

Thoughts raced through.

A small paper boat in the yarn river.

It burnt down in yellow thread.

Turning into grey beads.

The figure hidden in moonlight had skewered Rose eight times, evenly throughout, like a crucifixion.

"John Egbert." He heard, as he attempted to swim his way across the yarn river's current, his body cold, getting dragged under, clothes soaking on his back. "Do you want to save her?"

"Of course! I'm going to save you, Rose!" He cried, holding on to a rock made out of glued-together buttons. The current threatened to drag him under, three dolls looking at him contemptuously from the small bridge parallel to him, several dozen inches/thousand feet away.

"Form a contract with me, then. Make a wish and become a magical boy." The dog on the other side of the river said, its mouth curled upwards into a.

John didn't even have to think about it. Rose let out a loud, gurgling wail, her throat unusable.

"I wish I could save Rose!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clotho  
> Servant of the witch of light, she breeds the spiders for Norn's consumption.  
> Lachiesis  
> Servant of the witch of light, she seasons the spiders for Norn's consumption.  
> Atropos  
> Servant of the witch of light, she presents the spiders for Norn's consumption.


	3. Norn pt 2

[♫](https://youtu.be/btmSuNcxiIU)

"Get away from her!" John yelled, a small tempest of wind surrounding him as he shot forward like a thunder-bullet, ramming the handle of his hammer into the bulbous head of the stop-motion figure pinning Rose to the wall. Drifting backward half an inch, he twirled his hammer like a marching band rifle he played with all-too-many times, and swung hard like the baseball bat he played catch with his dad with, catching the cloth figure in the side and ripping her pins out of Rose, sending it flying with a twirl and twist of bright blue wind. He dropped down to the yarned Earth, pulling Rose up from the wall and tugging her into a tight, almost bone-crushing hug, before being responded to by a vigorous, cheek-staining slap.

"John, you imbecile! I told you not to try helping me!" Rose yelled, a soft yellow glow patching up the holes in her body, the gem set in the hood of her clothes gently glowing. "Look out!"

Twirling on his heel, John threw one hand out to the side, throwing Rose away at high speeds before jumping into the air, avoiding the cannonball of the cloth figure's round head. The world rippled and wobbled in motion as the yarn tugged on every other strand, three paper-thread figures struggling to keep up. Every movement was punctuated with a trail of blue light, and John felt vitality surging through his bones and muscles, hovering in the air as he got a good view on the creature they were fighting - together.

It looked like a giant cloth doll, with a large, spherical head and a dangling body, all made out of a deep cerulean thread. One arm was missing, leaking out a trail of red yarn that dragged behind the creature like intestines in a horror movie, the end frayed. Dozens of sewing pins were pierced through its head like a voodoo doll, each one gently bending back and forth so that it could scuttle along the yarn floor. It walked along the river, tainting the yarn red where the loose red strand touched, moving like some kind of obscene conglomeration of a strandbeest and several dozen spiders. "What the hell is that?" He asked, flying through the air like it was natural.

"John, not the time, just kill it! And why can you fly?" Rose half-asked, half-yelled, jumping off the wall to avoid one of the creature's pins. "Just call it Norn!"

John looked at his hand, watching a little twirl of clouds form in it. "Rose, do you trust me?" He yelled, the distance between them growing as the antechamber continued to swell out of control, Norn only growing faster and more frantic. He was hovering way out of reach, but he saw the three paper dolls standing underneath him, twirling and dancing like NPCs confused by their pathfinding.

"John, is now the time?" Rose almost screamed, leaving little threads of incandescent light behind her from her wands.

"Do you trust me!?" John yelled back, their voice eaten by the cloth as the stop-motion creature continued to head straight for Rose.

"Of course!" Rose strained, and John flicked his hand sideways, passing through that little cloud and causing Rose to shoot sideways, unprepared for the sudden velocity she's been tugged around at. She orients herself by tugging on her wands, and then points both feet forward, yarn hanging in the air as she arrives on the other side of the antechamber, her feet slapping against the wall. She let out a frustrated yell and tugged her wands down, white strands lashing like whips through the remnants of Norn's skull, revealing a glass marble about the size of Rose's head. "John, _move_!"

John did not move, because red hot pain almost made him drop his hammer, but his hands clenched harder. He grabbed the pin in his shoulder and yanked it out with a loud yell, wind pushing his body out of the way of a volley of thick yarn strands tied around pins. Blood spurted out into the air, and he tried to fly, fly away, only to barely avoid getting skewered. Several dozen pins rapidly approached, quickly lassoed into a bunch with white light and dragged down into the ground. John let his magic stop and began to freefall, putting his feet on his hammer's head like a pogo stick and crashing into the ground, sending titanic waves across the battlefield as he jumped up and away, leaving a crumpled doll in his wake. He sailed in an arc that would make a baseball batter jealous, watching the ripples of his impact still reverberate across the battlefield.

With a flick of her wrist, Rose severed the tips of the pins, sending them into the river, where the bright blue yarn quickly carried them away. Not missing a beat, the unravelled head of Norn flipped the pins onto their rounded ends, lashing out like an angry octopus and sending Rose flying into the wall. John's hammer managed to knock away two before he was punched in the gut and knocked into a squishy surface. The blows came hammering, cracking his glasses and chipping a tooth, as Norn's pinheads, each one the size of a human head, bashed into John. Another tooth gets knocked out, and he feels bruises welling up on his face as his hammer gets knocked away, a paper doll scuttling over to begin trying, and failing, to lift it up, even with the help of her two friends.

There's the sound of light, and a whip cracking, and several of the heads of Norn's pins are lashed away, but then John's skewered by a blunt metal pole as thick as his wrist and lets out a loud wail. Things start blurring at the edges.

It hurts. 

No.

I was so close.

My throat.

My hands.

I couldn't do anything.

I can't speak.

Rose, I'm sorry.

John's eyes open up as he gasps for air, feeling it going through his impromptu full-length tracheotomy. The glass marble cradled in red twine hanging inches from his face, batted away by a violently angry Rose coming in with a flying kick. The rest of Norn's dangling body sailed overhead, red thread slowly drooping in a gravity-defying arc. It was like Norn's head had transformed from a sphere into a spider, walking around on the heads of its broken pins. "John, heal yourself!" Rose said, whipping out with the white lines that came from the tips of her wand, lashing back and forth to pull Norn off balance. "Grab the gem on your neck and  _heal yourself, goddamnit_!" She screamed, wrapping up several dozen broken pins into a bunch and throwing them towards the house at the center of the chamber.

Norn sailed away in a line like a snake, each part following the other slowly, weighing nothing but crashing through the house like it was a meteor, obliterating it. The paper dolls quickly abandoned John's hammer and got to work repairing. John's punctured hand reached out and grabbed the gem hanging off his collar and just... Willed himself back. He felt something cracking a bit underneath his skin, as the holes disappeared in a swirl of blue wind, and he let out a loud, exhausted huff. "It's a Witch. You're a Magical Boy. We have to kill them. Jump!"

[♫](https://youtu.be/07qt2SXcfP0)

Didn't need to tell him twice. John popped his elbows back, throwing him off of the wall and flopping down on the ground just in time to avoid three pin-fists slamming into the space he just was in with enough velocity to definitely crush his skull in a single hit. Staying low to the ground, he soared like Sora using Glide, just high enough to avoid touching anything as he reached down and scooped up his hammer with one hand, twirling it as he knocked a felt tree into pieces.

"Norn, John!" Rose said from far up above him.

"Trust me!" John yelled back, dropping the head of his hammer into the ground and letting it begin to drag. Yarn flew loose, coming up in ripped, tattered waves behind him, while the paper dolls, having finished their construction and reconstruction of the yarn home, panicked, coming to grab the broken ground where John flew, trying desperately to knit it back together. "I'll rip it to tatters!"

The battleground must've been at least half a kilometer large now, only widening every second as more of the false cloth world grew from its edges. John flipped forward from his feet, bringing his knees up to his sides, twirling his hammer above his head, and bringing it down as hard as he could, swishing the air, at nothing at all. Norn's hundred fists began flying, the deadly silence of metal and plastic ripping through the air, until an explosion shot through with no accompaniment of a flaming orchestra. A downburst generated on the spot, an intense wall of wind rolling forward, tying Norn's arms in knots before ripping away her pins. The thunderclap was deafening, Rose's clothes disturbed by the sudden hurricane. Norn let out a loud groan, the sound of metal scraping against metal, as her single glass marble almost came free, and John was struck in the side.

Everything went white for a moment as he tumbled head over heels, losing track of his flight, crashing into the soft "earth" below. Using his hammer's handle to prop himself up, he grabbed Rose even though she was over a hundred meters away, watching with resoluteness glasses-less face. 

This time, she was ready. Rose came at it with both wands in a reverse grip, bringing them down as John's telekinetic windburst brought her between the cage of Norn's many arms. They made contact, driving into the glass like it was ice, and Norn let out a creaking, shrieking, metal-on-metal noise as all her arms immediately retracted with enough speed to leave a breeze in their wake, forming a collar of broken pins around the limp body's neck.

She shrieked, and shrieked, before shattering into pieces like a liquid nitrogen rose. Rose dropped to the ground, panting heavily, while John dropped to his knees, the yarn falling away offstage to reveal the interior of an abandoned warehouse, floor covered in glass. "John Egbert, you absolute buffoon." Rose said, grabbing a small gem from the ground and pressing it to the gem set in her hood, letting out a loud sigh as they both glowed and reverberated, before letting her magical clothes disperse into the day's school uniform. "Do you know what you've done?"

"Yeah, I saved you!" John shot back, graciously taking the gem when Rose offered it.

"You did, but I wish you hadn't. Press that to your Soul Gem. It's called a Grief Seed." Rose replied, and John was worried if those terms were euphemisms. "It'll heal any cracks in it that you may have sustained during combat."

"But nothing hit me there?" John asked, rising to his feet, rolling his shoulders and neck, everything cracking at once.

"Soul Gems are strained by both overusing your magic supply and by an excess of emotion. That's why I tried to do this by myself. Nobody to get emotional about." Rose responded, grimly, and John pulled her into a hug. She hugged him back, limply. "While your powers may have saved the day, I'm sure summoning up a small hurricane may have overexerted your Soul Gem a bit."

John checked the little dark blue gem hanging off his collar, and sure enough, there was a tiny little fracture running up the right side. So, shrugging his shoulders, he pressed the seed to his Soul Gem and let it wash away, dissolving into ash. "So, this is what you do all the time?"

"I hunt for Witches, yes."

"And that dog...?" John replied, almost jumping when the white dog appeared next to him, stalking forward paw-over-paw.

"My name is Becquerel." The dog replied, entirely in John's head.

"Right. Bec."

"Becquerel."

"Bec."

"Anyway." Rose interrupted, as John's clothing fell away to be replaced with his school uniform. "I take it you have questions?"

"A couple, yeah."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Norn  
> The Witch of Light. Her nature is egocentric. After abuse, after abuse, after abuse, after abuse, after abuse, after abuse, after abuse, after abuse, she grew bored with the vile nature of circumstance. Luck and fate do not exist in her world of cloth.


	4. Herodias pt 1

A loud, sharp wail, with enough force behind it to cut through stone, emerges from the smoky figure ahead of them. John bounds about while Rose remains firmly lifted into the sky by the witch's outcroppings of stone, emerging at awkward and impossible angles from each other, branching off like trees or fractals in order to slam Rose into themselves, looping and looping until she's crushed under several tonnes of granite. A twist of John's wrist and she comes flying out, buoyed by whips of blue and white wind, her eyes full of fury.

"Remember the plan, Joh-" She starts, cut off by a tombstone the size of a car ramming into her at approximately the speed of a car.

* * *

[♫](https://youtu.be/R3srhIS-LCo)

"And you remember, how two years ago, my own Mother up and disappeared from my life without a trace?" Rose replied, languidly stretching her legs out over the coffee table. Her manor was tidy and empty, like the ghost of a maid. All squares, sharp angles. A graveyard of memories. Rose picked her teacup up and gave it the simplest of sips, finishing the herbal blend with a clasp of the cup back onto its saucer, deposited thusly onto the table.

It was a desolate place to be in. John couldn't fathom living in some place this big, or this empty. Even his house, with just him and his Dad, that was empty enough that it felt liable to swallow him up some mornings, but Lalonde Manor was something akin to a black hole. Being in here made his spirit ache. Remnants of a previous occupant, like holograms on the surface of a singularity, stretched out over its surface - pictures of Rose on the fridge that abruptly stop at age 13, notebooks full of acres of script practice, Rose learning how to forge her mother's signature. Dishes in the sink. Clothes scattered in a loose pile. A blanket on the couch. From the way things looked, Rose didn't even leave this large antechamber anymore. The rest of the manor was a sacred, impenetrable space.

"Yeah," John said. Of course he remembered. He remembered the weeks Rose spent in the guest room at his house while the police searched and searched. Weeks spent over at Dave's while they gave her no news, no hope of escape. Dropping in and out of school. His train of thought was beginning to pile up with bad memories, crashing into each other like a fifty-two car pile-up on the freeway. "I thought they found her."

"I lied." Rose said, sharply and abruptly like she had dropped a knife from a considerable height and it just stuck into the cutting board. She looked like she was preparing this speech for a while. Her chest rises with air, and she sighs. "I've been lying to you all for two years."

John wasn't sure what to say. He was on the couch, while Rose was in a chair that looked like it had seen considerable use. His feet dangling to scrape the floor, he wasn't sure why tears were stinging the sides of his face, a field of little needle pricks. He felt something building up inside of him: a foreign sensation he hadn't felt since he was eight or nine. A full six years of bottling up, of existential ennui, a fundamental cavern inside of him that couldn't be filled with water, food, or cement.

John was  _furious_. When he got up, the house shook with the force of his motion. "You  _lied_? For  _two years_?"

Rose stared at him sternly, like she was a teacher expecting an unruly student to sit down without a word. John matched her gaze and resisted the urge to kick the table over. He turned around, looked away from Rose, and stomped in several wide circles, grabbing and pulling at his hair so that he had something to do with his hands except let them clench and unclench and dig blood from his palms. But by then, it was too late. His deepening voice, a year past the edge of cracking, begun to splinter again.

"So all those times we asked to come over, and your mom wouldn't let us! Or when Dave wanted to hang out on Christmas with you, I guess that was a lie too? And you skipping out on every class trip? They were taking us to the museum, Rose! You would've gotten to see all the naked statues and the beautiful paintings and - _ugh!_ " He screamed, loud enough that by the middle of his sentence, Rose had begun to shrink and shy away. "And all those days late to school - wait, how the  _fuck_ are you getting to school?"

The curse word made Rose flinch. John wasn't used to dropping them but it just glided from his mouth like a bird in the spring. "Are you driving yourself to the bus stop too?"

Rose finally broke her gaze and looked at her feet. John stopped walking in circles, just staring at her. John looked at her, and then to his bloody palms, flopping back down onto the couch, letting them face up to the ceiling. Just little pinpricks, nothing more. His face was hot and his nose stuffed up. When he sniffled, it was ugly and gross, and he had to get back up to find tissues, running his hands under hot water, cleaning them off, drying them. The air was uncomfortably still while he found the bandaids, applying one per palm. Then, back to Rose.

"Why didn't you ask us for help?" He asked, quietly, his voice sore even from that small bout of screaming. It cracked and crinkled like a piece of paper, unused to the duration or the intensity.

"I... Can handle my own affairs." Rose murmured. 

Her makeup was beginning to run. John shook his head, but he didn't raise his voice for what came next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Corey  
> Servants of the witch of death. They renounce her existence by the words inscribed upon their face.

**Author's Note:**

> All comments, kudos, bookmarks, and views are seen, noted, and greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading.
> 
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